May 9, 2010 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Wearing God’s Name

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 67
Numbers 6:22–27
Revelation 21:10, 22—22:5

“They will see his face,
and his name will be on their foreheads.”

Revelation 22:4 (NRSV)

The biblical depiction of life begins with the words “In the beginning God . . .” and it ends with a magnificent future that is also created by God. Just about everything in between also testifies to the eternal truth that life is made, redeemed, and certainly blessed by God. It’s a gift to be received . . . , not an achievement. Most of the biblical narrative for our lives can be seen as the unfolding drama of what happens when we do and do not accept our created identity as males and females made in the image of God, for communion with this Creator.

M. Craig Barnes
The Pastor as Minor Poet

One of the first things I heard four years ago, when I began ministry alongside you here at Fourth Church, was that one of the reasons people like coming to a church of our size is that they can be anonymous. People are busy, and they like to be able to slip in at 9:30 or 11:00 a.m. and slip out an hour later. Well, at the time, as a new Associate Pastor for Congregational Life, whose job is to engage every congregant into the full life of the church, I felt a little disheartened to hear that insight. I can tell you that we do our best every Sunday to encourage you to take a detour into Coffee Hour, where you can sign up for this or that and mingle and meet each other, before you head out onto Michigan Avenue.

Truly, however, I am skeptical that anyone anymore comes to church with a desire to be anonymous. When there are so many other ways we could be spending our precious Sunday morning time—with a newspaper and a cup of coffee, for example—that any of us are here makes me wonder what reason would compel us to choose church over other options. I am going to hypothesize that though there may be many reasons at work in our lives, one is that we sense the significance of knowing truly who we are and whose we are. I have a hunch that you parents who have brought your children to be baptized today have done so out of a deep desire for your children to know just this: that they are children of God and that they belong to God forever.

In a book written mainly for pastors, seminary professor M. Craig Barnes writes that “few pastors will deny that on Sunday mornings we look across the pulpit into the pews with a sense of envy. Everyone else in the church came because they wanted to be there. They’re all free.” “Parishioners,” he writes, “are freed by a spiritual anonymity pastors will never know” (The Pastor as Minor Poet, p. 6).

It is true that you don’t have to be here the way we have to be here and that you don’t have to wear these black-and-white collars in order to be identifiable on Sunday mornings and we do. But to say that parishioners are freed by a “spiritual anonymity” is not really true, for we believe that by virtue of our existence alone, we are all children of God, made in God’s image; that through our baptism, we are sealed in Christ by the Holy Spirit; and that in our daily lives, we are all called to wear God’s name in one way or another.

This is what the scriptures, from beginning to end, teach us. Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are full of different images of how the people of God are to be visibly, recognizably, and identifiably his. The first scripture lesson read this morning, taken from the book of Numbers, provides one of those images. Because it is one of our most cherished passages, let me read it again:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you,
and give you peace.

This is a blessing that many of you know by heart. It is the blessing that God tells Moses to tell Aaron and his sons to say to Israel. God tells the priests “to put God’s name on the Israelites so that God might bless them.” Since ancient times, the blessing has served as the final benediction in both synagogues and churches, with the role of sending God’s people out. Within the book of Numbers, it is God’s final word of hope and peace spoken to Israel just as a new generation of Israelites are preparing to go into the promised land, as the older generation had hoped it would do. They are about to go into a land where they will be among peoples different from themselves, peoples who maintain different traditions and worship other gods. They will be challenged and stretched and may feel tried and tested. God equips them not with special horses, superior weapons, or shields of armor, but instead God puts his name upon them and blesses them. Rather than sending the Israelites forth with ways to defend themselves from every new encounter, God equips them with the blessing of knowing who they are and whose they are. As their surroundings and circumstances will change radically and what was familiar will be replaced by what is foreign, they will, God knows, have to negotiate new and old ways, new and old values, new and old identities. And these, we know, are not easy negotiations.

A pioneer in the field of Soviet social history, Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick from the University of Chicago has, through her scholarship, shown how in times of great social change, as in times of revolution, individuals are pressed not only to negotiate between old and new identities, but to reconstruct their identities. Having studied Soviet history not only from the perspective of the Soviet government and Communist bureaucracy, but also from the perspective of individuals making up Soviet society, Dr. Fitzpatrick has been able to tell the stories of individuals in their attempts to reconstruct who they are during post-revolutionary Russia. We know that revolutions change the rules of everyday life, and certainly the Soviet Revolution did this. In her book Tear Off the Masks! she shows how “in such upheavals, people have to reinvent themselves, to create or find within themselves personae that fit the new post-revolutionary society” (p. 3). Dr. Fitzpatrick has observed that reconstructing one’s identity always involves strategizing about how best to present oneself in a new world and that, furthermore, revolutions in general, not just the Soviet Revolution, usually involve claims about authenticity. They require proof that the people, in their new identities, are who they claim to be, that in their hearts they always were whoever it is they are trying to become. In times of revolution, people cannot simply be anonymous. For better or worse, they have to reconstruct and defend their identities.

In the book of Revelation, the prophet John lays out a vision that is the ultimate revolution. In it, God creates a new heaven and a new earth, in which the first heaven and the first earth have passed away and all former things shall no longer be remembered. What could be more revolutionary than this? In the passage from Revelation that I read this morning, John describes what this new creation will be like. In line with the earlier Hebrew prophets who envisioned the restoration of Jerusalem, John calls the new creation “the new Jerusalem.” This Jerusalem, however, has no temple. Instead the Lord God and the Lamb Jesus Christ are themselves the temple. They will dwell directly in the midst of their people. No particular place or sanctuary will be necessary because all of creation will be God’s holy ground. No priests or intermediaries will be needed because God’s people will see God face-to-face. Whereas in the past God allowed no one to see him face-to-face and only Moses to see his back as he passed by, John envisions God in the end-time to be so close to God’s people that they will intimately know his face. Drawing on the priestly benediction that he too knew, John evokes the image of the Lord making his face to shine upon Israel and lifting up his countenance upon them, when he says in verse 4 that the people of God “will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (Revelation 22:4).

In the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, John saw that God had begun the revolution that would culminate and end with the new Jerusalem that he envisioned. In John’s day, Christianity was still more of a movement than an established religion, and you can imagine all the people this movement swept up. You can imagine how effective John was in eliciting confessions of both faith and fraud. There is no small amount of pressure running throughout the book of Revelation. Certainly the pressure is partly due to the fact that John envisions this complete revolution to be final, that is, to take place at the end of time, which allows for no second chances and very little time for indifference or indecision. Some of the pressure we feel, however, is also due to the fact that John is demanding authenticity. Among those who profess to be Christians, there are some who are not genuine. John demands everyone to know who they are by knowing whose they are, for only those who know they are children of God will receive God’s blessing and will know God face-to-face.

The demand for authenticity that John makes, however, is qualitatively different from the demands of the Bolsheviks or any other revolutionary party in history, for John wants people to know that who they are does not depend on and cannot be changed by any circumstance in life. No matter how powerfully the political winds blow, no matter what ideological party is in power, no matter how tight the clench on one’s life a totalitarian regime may have, no matter . . . . In the end the only thing that matters is that each person knows who he is by knowing whose he is.

In 1991, my father was granted permission by the North Korean government to visit his family in North Korea. Having been separated during the Korean War, for the first time in over forty years they were reunited. His visit was controlled in every way, just as the lives of his family members there were. Conversations had to be measured and words softly exchanged. My father’s relatives asked him initial questions, but no follow-up questions. One of the initial questions, of course, was about his daughters. My father told them that his elder daughter was an engineer, which immediately his family members seemed to appreciate, and that his younger daughter was in school studying religion. After a brief moment of puzzlement at this, the topic of conversation changed. Only later did my father’s brother-in-law, whom my father knew as a child, share quietly with him that he was still a Christian. Having gone to church as a little boy, before Korea was divided into two countries and the northern half was taken over by Communists, he still, after all those years, understood himself to be Christian. When my father asked whether his own children knew, he answered, “No.”

There are places where people cannot speak the name of God in their own homes, to their own children; places where people most certainly cannot wear the name of God for all to see. In place of God’s name, they have to wear other names and construct other identities.

What John envisions in the end-time is a new city in which God and his people are so close that they can see each other face-to-face, and seeing each other face-to-face, all but their true identities fall away. People from all nations will be found in the new Jerusalem. People of all classes, even some kings, will be there too. In the new Jerusalem, no one will need to construct his identity; everyone will be free to be who he knows himself to be: a child of God.

Given the freedoms that we enjoy, it may be hard for us to understand the experience of being forced to construct an identity. It is quite easy, however, for us to understand the process of constructing identities, for we engage in it all the time. In fact, we assume that identity is something we can construct for ourselves. We think it strange anymore to inherit vocations from our families; we ask our children what they want to be when they grow up; we put upon ourselves the responsibility of determining who we will become by making the right choices along the way. These are all good things. They reflect, I think, societal freedoms for which we are grateful. Given our driving assumption, however, that identity can be determined by what we do, we run the risk of missing the challenge at the heart of John’s revelation. John poses an existential challenge, and it is as critical for us as it is for anyone to hear. He challenges people everywhere, from every nation and from every class, to know in their hearts who they are by knowing whose they are.

Like all existential matters, this knowledge lies deep beneath the surface of things. Except on Ash Wednesday, when we wear ashes in the sign of the cross, we don’t usually wear God’s name on our foreheads. Since ancient times, however, the church has hoped and prayed that, for the sake of the world, there will come a new day when the distance of anonymity will be bridged and all who know that they are children of God will be able to wear God’s name and, held in such closeness with God, will even see God face-to-face.

“Let everyone who hears say, ‘Come, Lord Jesus!” Amen.